Sergei Filatov, Yeltsin’s chief of staff, was behind the next party-building maneuver in 1994 and into 1995. He and Aleksandr Yakovlev founded a Russian Party of Social Democracy, dedicated to democratic values and a mixed economy, and registered it in February 1995. Filatov and Yakovlev felt they had a commitment from Yeltsin to help it with financing, back it in the next Duma election, and chair it after that.16 Despite assurances, Yeltsin went off on a tangent. Prodded by Shakhrai, the spoiler from 1993, he gave license for not one but two pro-presidential electoral groupings. Our Home Is Russia, headed by Viktor Chernomyrdin, who had sat out the 1993 election, was right-of-center programmatically (right in the sense of favoring the market over government control); the bloc struck by Ivan Rybkin, the Duma speaker, was left-of-center (left in the sense of partiality for government direction over the market). On April 25, 1995, Yeltsin jumped the gun to unveil plans for the two blocs to journalists and to blubber that they would stride coordinately in “two columns,” implying that they were apologists for the status quo. After that, he did not bestir himself to help either organization, although he did go on television on December 15 to speak out against the command economy and plans to restore the Soviet Union. Rybkin assumed he was at liberty to rebuke the prime minister and the government, only to find that, whenever he did, Chernomyrdin complained to him and Yeltsin; he also was strapped for campaign funds.17 On election day, December 17, Rybkin scraped together 1 percent of the popular vote. Our Home Is Russia far exceeded him in resources and had thirty-six governors on its national list, yet Yeltsin made slighting comments about its drawing power and it was not able to claim that it spoke for the president. Chernomyrdin noted both these points to Korzhakov. “I said to him right away [after Yeltsin made his comments in September], ‘Boris Nikolayevich, this is not my personal initiative only, it is necessary to all of us.’” Yeltsin was unmoved. “And then the governors would ask me, ‘Are you together or not together?’ I would say, ‘What are you talking about, why don’t you want to understand?’ [And they would reply], ‘We’re not able to figure it out, and that is it.’”18 On December 17 Our Home Is Russia finished with a puny 10 percent. The winner in the popular vote (with 23 percent) and in seats was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the KPRF, which was ferally opposed to Yeltsin.
Why all the bobbing and weaving on affiliation with a party? Yeltsin did not offer a reason during his years as president. In an interview in the privacy of retirement, he offered this comment:
The CPSU had left a belch in the air. I had an extreme reaction against the word “party,” an allergy against all of this stuff. So I had no wish to join any party and I did not join one, and I am not a member of any party today. . . . I had a very negative attitude toward [the creation of] a unifying party. . . . [I felt I should] be above the interests of any party. I was the president. He should respect every registered party and every tendency in society; he should help them and listen to them. That is it. If I had been a member of one of the parties, I would have had to concern myself with lobbying for that party. That would have been incorrect. . . . I did not want to give up on this preference of mine, that was a credo for me. . . . The president should be above all these things.19
